Closing Remark

After studying this course, I have been updated with some industry new developments and theories, I have done more research and am now convinced that our business (as a SME) should use an open source CMS such as Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress. I have used Drupal in the past, but Joomla 1.5 and its Joomla framework tools seems to be able to take our project further.

I have recently been using Joomla 1.0 (a version of Mamba) as our CMS for various websites including a new Corporate website (http://www.ClubFervor.com ) . Currently I am also evaluating Joomla 1.5 which has subtantial support from various frameworks.

I have also recently reviwed some presentation from the developer community. Here is one of them http://hdl.handle.net/1807/10363 and http://www.scribd.com/doc/15093512/Joomla-Framework-Tour

It appears that using a framework development tools, i may be able to make use of the Joomla CMS and wrapped around it with custom application developed via rapid prototyping tools.

Interesting indeed. !!

Elevator Pitch# 2

Hi. My name is Daniel Chun. This course has been useful in introducing many contemporary internet technologies, web development tools and its underlying benefits. I graduated in computer science 20 years ago, and have mostly been developing business models for internet business (B2B and B2C) side as opposed to involving in coding. Having said that, the ability to get back to the lower level working with syntax and codes still gives me that extra edge when managing complex business relationships, processes, analysis and outcomes.

Although the RoR workshops and tutorials have been more than what I can cope for, I am sure that the intent to get the student understanding the elegance of the contemporary approach to rapid prototyping and development process was the message to today's manager. As a General Manager of a SME in HK, my learnings here in this course will be mostly focused in developing a means (through e-infrastructure and portal and modules development) to engage users (end customers) of our hardline products to become our own "loyal customers" "believers". I will be consuming more of my time to understand what will be the best way for our business to use existing open source CMS system such as Joomla, and other people's loyalty management system to integrate into a complete CRM system. Some modules and components will be developed using these framework to be installed under Joomla.

Thank you.

Exercise 26.

1. I have chosen the scope of study to focus on the business integration of Customer Relationship Managament in a manufacturing environment.

2. Summarise your understanding and describe its relevance (250 words max) in either your study at university or in your work environment;

As a manufacturer involving in both OBM (ie. original brand manufacturing) and OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing); our end customers are indirectly serviced through retailers and distributors. As such, it is often very difficult to understand what are the customers feedback and purchasing behaviour. Getting access to these information are often a tedious and inefficient process of collecting paper based feedbacks and complaints. With the advent of telecommunications, manufacturers can use various touch points such as web, mobile and interactive kiosks to engage a consumer to tell more about their experience. Proctor & Gamble has designed MyPampers.ca - a loyality solution in rewarding their customers some form of rewards. This engagement of end customers now allows the manufacturer or brand owner to learn more about the customer's purchase and consumption behavior. The need to integrate a component of the CRM is to ensure that the business process are tracked when there are multiple touch points in which consumers can interact with the company or system as a whole, the records or business intelligence are therefore essential to deliver services to end customers. A collective database supported by analytics engines gives a business the intelligence to forecast demand, seasonal purchase patterns, and to a certain extent involve users in the feedback loop of new product development (NPD).

Exercise 25. M-Commerce

1. Location based service - means the ability to correctly identify the location of a mobile customers and then offer a series of value added services that are of great interest to the mobile users. The exact mechanism of offering this service is based on the premise that the cell sites base station can actually track the users using their bearings when mathematically calculate through three or more base stations transceiving the signals for a mobile phone being switched on. In theory, there are always overlapping signal coverage to a mobile but only one is providing the actual signal path at a time via a contention algorithm. So there are also other signals providing a mobile phone even though it is not engaged in the active mode per se.

By using the other passive base stations' and its signal strength and additional information about the direction of the signals, these informaiton can help a mobile operator to identify approximately where a mobile user will be. And based on this assumption, a mobile operator or a value added service provider can therefore offer information or service coupons or offers that is based on these geographic locales.

Restaurant and shopping guides, coupon offers, and similar call for action type service are the most common services.


2. WAP or SMS services for an airline website and a bank will be significantly different. The banking industry will have more details and audit trail since banks are required by laws and regualtion for certain money laundering activities, and this touch point or channel for completing a transaction would be perceived as the same as going to the bank. Although the services that can be viewed (ie. Informational base) such as real time or not is irrelevant, the substantial consequence of using WAP and SMS as a channel in a banking environment would be definitely be governed the same way as a bank teller window.

3. W3C website has specific micro sub site on VoiceXML. http://www.w3.org/Voice/
Voice based hypertext markup languages is the original thought for VoiceXML is the W3C's standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It allows voice applications to be developed and deployed in an analogous way to HTML for visual applications.

According to W3C, the VoiceXML 3.0 is being implemented now since Dec 2008 published. Many applications have been deployed, processing millions of telephone calls per day. These applications include: order inquiry, package tracking, driving directions, emergency notification, wake-up, flight tracking, voice access to email, customer relationship management, prescription refilling, audio newsmagazines, voice dialing, real-estate information and national directory assistance applications.

Most of the applications todate appears to be at inbound or outbound calling related applications typical of a customer call center, tele-marketing, operator-assisted environment and perhaps used for "software agents".

4. Nokia is predominantly a hardware manufacturer from mobile switch CO, base station related BCS, BTS, software, handphones, drivers for handphones, open application interface - they have also invest resources in the development of applications of mobile devices. When being described as end-to-end expertise.

Companies that are involved in mobile telephony market today may not necessary have the expertise and intimate knowledge of the necessary technology at the back end - the ones that actually provides the call, the call transfer, the location based advisory service, etc. Although a common protocol are often followed using industry standards such as GSM MoU, 3GPP, ITU, IEEE, etc.

As a leading mobile technology provider, Nokia offers the infrastructural domain expertise more than just the "handphones" we see today. Most of us have never seen a BTS, BCS or mobile switches in their entire life.

Exercise 24. Virtual business worlds and software agents

1. There are the following didfferent kind of software agents.

Intelligent Software agents
Autonomous agents
Distributed agents
Multi-agents
Mobile agents
Fuzzy agents

2. An extensive amount of software intelligence - in the form of articficial intelliegence and according to Wikipedia, Intelligent agents (also known as rational agents) are not just software programs, they may also be machines, human beings, communities of human beings (such as firms) or anything that is capable of goal directed behavior.

3. e-Commerce vs Software agents

Agents can used the latest and prevalent technologies to handle transactions carried over on the internet space (

4. a, b LC_MOO at http:///
,
C. I cannot get it working, Only using Browse and a screen that explains ROCKY ..


Tried using it with an account "train1" and "train1" as pwd




Reference:

1. Griss, M (2001) Software Agent as next generation software components. Ch.36 in Component-Based Software Engineering: Putting the Pieces Together. Addison Wesley

Exercise 23. Searching mechanisms

1. An Internet spider is a program designed to "crawl" over the World Wide Web, the portion of the Internet most familiar to general users, and retrieve locations of Web pages. It is sometimes referred to as a webcrawler. Many search engines use webcrawlers to obtain links, which are filed away in an index. When a user asks for information on a particular subject, the search engine pulls up pages retrieved by the Internet spider. Without spiders, the vast richness of the Web would be all but inaccessible to most users, rather as the Library of Congress would be if the books were not organized.

Some search engines are human-based, meaning that they rely on humans to submit links and other information, which the search engine categorizes, catalogues, and indexes. Most search engines today use a combination of human and crawler input. Crawler-based engines send out spiders, which are actually computer programs that have sometimes been likened to viruses because of their ability to move between, and insert themselves into, other areas in cyberspace.

Spiders visit Web sites, record the information there, read the meta tags that identify a site according to subjects, and follow the site's links to other pages. Because of the many links between pages, a spider can start at almost any point on the Web and keep moving. Eventually it returns the data gathered on its journey to the search engine's central depository of information, where it is organized and stored. Periodically the crawler will revisit the sites to check for changed information, but until it does so, the material in the search engine's index remains the same. It is for this reason that a search at any time may yield "dead" Web pages, or ones that can no longer be found.

No two search engines are exactly the same, the reason being (among other things) a difference in the choice of algorithm by which the indices are searched. Algorithms can be adjusted to scan for the frequency of certain keywords, and even to circumvent attempts at keyword stuffing or "spamdexing," the insertion of irrelevant search terms intended simply to draw traffic to a site.

2. Meta-Search Engine - appears like an aggregator for receiving your input (search requests) and forward the request to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source. Metasearch engines enable users to enter search criteria once and access several search engines simultaneously. Metasearch engines operate on the premise that the Web is too large for any one search engine to index it all and that more comprehensive search results can be obtained by combining the results from several search engines. This also may save the user from having to use multiple search engines separately.

3. I know this from my personal experience in SEO (without paying anyone to list to top spots)

Tried "Little Scientist" or "BOYTOYS", my listings are at the top.

Metatags keywords - by creating lots of relevant keywords within the tags
Use lots of texts in the content body, sometimes links to outside websites, and also have external websites (eg. Blogs, forums, other community sites such as linkedin, youtube, wikipedia to link back). I have also tried building google and SEO friendly CMS like DRUPAL which is extremely friendly to search engines and have them linked to the sites.

In the past, both Yahoo and Google allows a customer to enter the URL to get it listed.
The name of the page is also important, avoid using redirect clause as spiders do not like them.

Exercuse 22. CRM and SCM

CRM (customer relationship management) The sales and marketing function is responsible for selling the organization’s products or services. It helps to identify the customers for the firm’s products or services, determining what customers need or want, planning and development products and services to meet their needs, and advertising and promoting these products and services, It also concerned with contacting customers, selling the products and services, taking orders and following up on sales. Many companies are turning to deploying CRM systems to maximize the benefits of their customer assets and capitalize the relationship with end consumers. CRM strategy will entail some form loyalty management systems which allows consumers to enter some data from various touch points (websites, SMS, retail POS); and by consolidating and analyzing the data, and then process them into the business intelligence required by business managers.

SCM (supply chain management) is the process of planning, implementing and controlling the operations of the supply chain with the purpose to satisfy customer requirements as efficiently as possible.

e-SCM is the application of information and communication technologies to form a seamless path for the smooth delivery of goods and products from suppliers, manufactuers, distributoers and retailers int othe hands of customers

Reference

Bartz., T (2006) User customization : Utilizing Content Management Systems to efficiently organize user group content. Thesis publication for research at Kent State University. Retrieved on May 18, 2009 at http://www.personal.kent.edu/~tbartz/portfolio/masters.pdf

Fill C & Fill K (2005) Business to Business Marketing – Relationships, Systems and communications, Prentice Hall

Kim, B (2005) Mastering Business In Asia – Supply Chain Management. Pp. 83-86. John Wiley & Sons

Laudon & Laudon (2006), “Management Information System, Managing The Digital Firm, 9th Edition”, Pearson Education

Ozer, M (2005) Online Business: tailoring your business environment in order to compete. Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong. Published by Elsevier.